Undermanning for fun and profit

A few days ago I was helping Alieth out in H-Blood Furnace (turns out a caster shaman can’t really solo a place full of mobs that stun and interrupt – who knew?), and Magtheridon was complaining about how the orcs downstairs should stop leeching his blood, as he does.

So I told Alieth we should try and see if we could two-man Magtheridon. The last time we tried we were in worse gear and a tank / DPS pair rather than tank / healer, so it didn’t go terribly well.

So we killed the end boss of H-Blood Furnace and off we went.

Now – keep in mind, as you read this: Feral Druid tank, Restoration Shaman healer, both very epically well-geared (264+ items). Results might vary if you try this yourself.

Magtheridon

You’re not going to manage to kill the adds. Don’t even bother. We tried, and even with two interrupts and attempts at bursting a specific one down they just healed to full.

So we just ignored them. They don’t hurt that much; they will continuously spawn infernals, but I just picked those up and kept hitting Magtheridon. They won’t despawn when he dies, but they will despawn when everybody runs out (of the doors to Magtheridon’s room, not out of the instance proper).

He took a bit to die (13 minutes) – but he drops 500 gold (!), plus Tier 4 tokens (I’m still missing mine), plus random epics. 250+ gold per person for 13 minutes’ worth of effort is quite nice in terms of gold/hour. We’ll probably be doing this every week.

Gruul’s Lair

Maulgar was a bit hairy. There were times when Alieth got polymorphed and I was feared, so I couldn’t push survival cooldowns – but we managed and it didn’t take too long. We killed Blindeye the Seer first (heals), then Kiggler the Crazed (polymorphs), then Olm the Summoner (deathcoils the tank), then Krosh Firehand (doesn’t do much by himself, although you’ll need somebody with offensive magic dispel to get rid of his Spell Shield or it’ll take for-bloody-ever).

Serpentshrine Cavern

To keep it short: everything but Lady Vashj is two-mannable. Lurker was probably the most annoying of the lot (we ended up just fighting him always underwater with water breathing on), with Fathom-Lord Karathress a close second (Caribdis’ heals are ridiculously fast and annoying to interrupt, the healer will eat every single used-to-be-random-target 50%-of-your-health shadowbolt, and we actually ran into the berserk timer on him – I ended up pushing every cooldown I had and whittling down the last 200-300k or so of his health after Alieth got one-shot). You will need to switch Hydross a few times (and deal with the resulting adds); Morogrim was mostly uneventful (tank him on the place your healer gets stunned at so you can more easily pick up the murlocs that spawn); Leotheras felt like a push-over, especially considering how hard he used to be at level.

Lady Vashj will just zerg you down with adds in phase 2. Bring a spare DPS or two or don’t even bother trying.

All in all, we’ll probably be doing this until we get the Tier 5 pieces (I’m still missing the gloves from Leotheras, for instance) and any other drop we might want (we’ll need to investigate), then just leave it be. It takes too much time to be profitable otherwise.